Cut Claude Code Token Costs 60-90% With rtk: Hands-On Guide

Jenny Ouyang's two-month Claude Code bill came to $1,600. She wrote up the autopsy on her Build to Launch Substack, and the diagnosis was unambiguous: the prompts were not the problem. The tool output was. "Every time Claude reads a file, runs a shell command, or calls an MCP server, the full output gets appended to context," she wrote. By message 40 of a session, she was paying for everything that came before - over and over.